If I should write about my twinsie, for which she is known to me, I could write and write and never stop writing. That’s how deep and wide the river runs when you are a twin.
In this photo above, I had just received devastating news that would alter my life forever, and eventually plunge me into the very dark suffocating dust of depression. It’s not life threatening, but it is life altering, and one day this blog will be about it, and the “Great Depression” that followed, but today it’s about my twin and her beside me, and me beside her through thick and thin.
On this day, there was torrential rain, and flooding over much the northern part of the state. I was to see this specialist on my own, but twinsie insisted she go with. We had the wake of our good friend’s mom to attend later in that evening way south in the boondocks, and this appointment was near the city, so we could bypass going back to our town and grab the tollway to get to our friends’ side and hopefully avoid the more serious flooding, though that didn’t work out as expected either. The rain and flooding had other plans.
I was told to expect testing and that it could take a good part of the day, so twinsie came with her iPad and would settle in to play games while she waited. As we drove over the water logged roads, I didn’t tell her that I already knew the news was going to be difficult. I had prepared for the worst, but still this tiny, golden shred of hope remained. I knew I needed a miracle.
Five minutes with the specialist confirmed that the specialist who referred me to him–and who had given me hope where there was none–was wrong, and there was nothing anyone could do to make it right in all of medicine’s amazing technological advances. There would be no miracle for me on this day.
Twinsie and I sat in the car where the first of the tears came, she was shocked, surely there was something someone somewhere could do? The rain thundered on the hood of the car echoing the despair inside it. What to do now with this day that we thought held promise? We decided to shop–retail therapy, this is the twins’ way.
Off to the biggest mall in the city we went. We sat for hours in a restaurant and we talked, but as it always is, we had much to say about a lot of things, and since we were there surrounded by great sadness, we let the deep stuff come, and I consoled her, and she me, and in our eyes in this photo, if you look closely enough, you will see the depth of the pain, that our smiles can’t hide.
I am wearing the tiny diamond studs we bought that afternoon, they are up higher on my ears, near the cartilage, but not in it, OUCHIE, Beckie has the same ones, hers are perfectly matching on each ear, as I watched over the process. One marker dot, “too low”, one marker dot, “too high”, one more dot, “ahh, there, that’s perfect.”
My turn, one dot, Beckie glances over, looks, then looks up to see where we were headed next and then glanced again, yup, that was good, “oops” and so now I have an earring in my right ear that doesn’t quite match the left, and you know, that’s fine with me, for two reasons, the first is that I can always remind her of how she screwed up (yes, at 55, we still are SISTERS) and because it tells the story of how things are not perfect, how once it’s done, there is no turning back, and I am learning to live with that. Yet, through it all, as in almost every part of my life, good and bad, I have my twinsie beside me to blame, and to console me, and that is a sweet, beautiful miracle all its own.
harmonyspearls 